Residents meet with city officials to discuss making Broadway safer
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BANGOR - City officials heard from members of the public Thursday night regarding a busy and dangerous section of Broadway.

The city plans to redesign a set part of the road to make it much safer, but exactly how they plan to do that is concerning both business owners and residents.

At any given time of day, you can expect Broadway in Bangor to be fairly busy.

"Broadway probably has the highest traffic volume in the City of Bangor," said city engineer John Theriault.

Paul Winkler knows that to be true. He owns Tri City Pizza, which sits at a pretty dangerous intersection.

"Speed is the biggest problem," said Winkler. "That's when most of the accidents happen, when people are speeding down the outside lane going south on Broadway, going at a pretty good clip and it's not 25 m.p.h."

In fact, a 2015 study by the City of Bangor revealed the section of Broadway between Center Street and the I-95 southbound on-ramps saw the highest number of accidents, coupled with heavy congestion.

"You know it hasn't been good for a long long time, it's about time we did something," said Winkler.

Winkler and other residents voiced their concerns at an informational meeting at Bangor City Hall Thursday night.

City officials were on hand to go over proposed changes and gather input.

"If we're going to do something about the high crash locations in the corridor, probably things and the way the intersections operate, they're going to need to change," said Theriault.

Those changes could include better speed limit enforcement, changing traffic patterns, or even eliminating left turns off of side roads, something Winkler says would hurt his business.

"Something has to be done, but closing off Center Street on my end kinda boxes me out of off the street. I don't have an entrance or exit," Winkler said.

"If we can make the corridor safer and impact the fewest people, then that's what we feel we need to do," said Theriault.

Project engineers will now take that public input into consideration when designing changes to the road.

Kayla joined the ABC 7 & FOX 22 news team in May of 2017. She got into journalism because she loves talking with people, and she's incredibly grateful to share the stories of Mainers throughout the region.